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Despite an official warning to stay away, hundreds of protesters
gathered in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou on Aug. 1 for the second
Sunday in a row to protest in support of the Cantonese language. The
demonstrators were met by a heavy police presence at the city's People's
Park, and several people were detained.

The rallies were inspired by a proposal by a Guangzhou political advisory
body to increase the amount of local television broadcast in Mandarin, China's
official language, to make visitors feel welcome during the Asian Games
being held in the city in November. That touched a nerve among some people
in the megalopolis who felt Cantonese, which is widely
spoken in the region, was under assault. (See pictures of a Mandarin school in Minneapolis.)

Last week, Ouyang Yongsheng, deputy director of the general office of
the Guangzhou city government, said at a press conference that there
were no efforts to marginalize Cantonese and that those spreading rumors to the
contrary "will be duly punished," the China Daily reported. One
person was held after the initial July 25 protest and placed under a
five-day detention for promoting the demonstration online, according to the
newspaper.

Following yesterday's protest, the Guangzhou public-security bureau
issued a notice on its website that the gathering at the People's
Park was the work of "a small number of people with insufficient
rationality and one or two with ulterior motives" and that "individual
troublemakers would be punished." Ye Du, a Guangzhou writer who attended
both protests, said the authorities took a far more aggressive stance this
weekend. "At least a thousand policemen were at the scene," Ye said. He was
detained shortly after arriving at the park Sunday. "By 2:30 p.m., I was
taken away by some cops to 'have coffee,' and they didn't release me until
around 6 p.m." (Watch a video about Mandarin hip-hop.)

In Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese city where Cantonese
predominates, about 200 people gathered at Southorn Playground in the
Wanchai district on Sunday to support the mainland protest. "We are here to
echo the Guangzhou people's voices because we believe Guangzhou people are
our brothers and sisters," said Hon Lin Shan, an official with the Hong Kong
Professional Teachers' Union. "If their freedom of choice is interfered
with, sooner or later Hong Kong people's freedom of choice will be
interfered with, because we are in the same country."

Cantonese is widely
used in Guangzhou and in parts of the neighboring region of Guangxi, as
well as in Hong Kong. Cantonese is also commonly spoken in many Chinatowns
around the world, though it now has greater competition from the
Fujianese and Mandarin imported by more recent generations of migrants.
Cantonese is the language of Cantopop music and most Hong Kong films, which
are widely influential in the greater Chinese-speaking world. It is
tonally more complex than Mandarin and has a few unique characters, though
in formal writing the languages are largely the same.

For most of the past century, successive Chinese governments have
encouraged the use of standard Mandarin, which is based on the Beijing
dialect. In classrooms in the South, it is common to see signs that say
"Please speak putonghua,"  the Communist Party's name for standard
Chinese  to remind children not to use their local dialect while at
school.

The pro-Cantonese protests in Guangzhou and Hong Kong have been fairly
small, but they represent a broader effort by speakers of common
Chinese dialects to stand up for their languages in the face of strong
official promotion of Mandarin. In Shanghai, one radio host's denouncement of
a listener's plea in December to not use Shanghainese on-air became a hot topic of that dialect's supporters online.
Local comic Zhou Libo has won huge audiences for his routines that use
Shanghainese almost exclusively.

But while the authorities tolerate those types of cultural expression,
they are much more wary of organized protests. "The central government is
very concerned about unity," says Joseph Cheng, a political-science
professor at City University of Hong Kong. "There's a lack of tolerance for
these things. They see this as a sort of contamination  lack of political
correctness and the result of outside influences."

Demonstrators at the Hong Kong rally argued that Cantonese and
Mandarin should be allowed to coexist. "Every Chinese should know how to
speak Mandarin," said Kevin Kong, a 29-year-old Guangzhou native who
migrated to Canada. "But at the same time, everyone has the right to speak
their native language. There shouldn't be any conflict between the two
languages. Just because you speak Mandarin doesn't mean you should give up
your mother language."